odanny
Diamond Member
This is a long read, but it's interesting, and illuminating, and is a warning for America, that if you let rightwing nationalists get control, they will ultimately almost always run a democracy into the ditch. England is on its way to becoming a failed state because of Brexit, and the country is falling apart.
Q: Is there anything that poor old Britain can do to save itself?
Good question. Tough question. To answer it well, first we have to talk about the situation Britain’s really now in. And the only way that can really be described — well, let me come to that, in just a second. Let’s begin with just the facts, so we’re all on the same page, the one called “reality.”How dire is Britain’s state of crisis? It’s…staggering. I really mean that. And I don’t think that even Brits really fully grasp just how numbingly, shockingly much of a crisis they’re in.
If I share with you some of the stats of British collapse, your jaw will — I all but guarantee it — drop.
Forty…thousand. Teachers. Quit. How many is that, in proportion? That’s almost 10%. Almost 10% of Britain’s teachers quit…just last year.
I want you to really stop and think about that number. To the economist in me? That is a cataclysmic number. You don’t get numbers worse than that. It’s the kind of number we see in genuinely cataclysmic situations — natural disasters, utter catastrophes, wars. 10% of teachers quitting in a single year? Teaching is supposed to be one of a modern society’s most stable and secure professions — the closest thing there is left, or one of them, to a job for life. When economists like me see numbers like this? Our hearts start to pound, and yours should too, because something is explosively wrong here.
To put that another way, 10% a year gives you a decade before you don’t haveany teachers left. These are genuine statistics of social collapse. I use the term British collapse, I hope you understand, through an example like this, for a reason. It’s not to scare you or for hyperbole’s sake. The crisis is that dire. The facts, the numbers, the statistics, are almost impossibly bad. We should never, ever see this happen to a rich, modern country — and when it does, it’s stopping being one, obviously. Imagine what other kind of event it’d take for 10% of teachers to quit in a single year — to cause an exodus like that — and you get some sense of how astonishingly badly and fast Britain’s crumbling.
We economists call that “human capital flight,” on a mass, shocking scale, and we don’t see it, usually, outside genuine social emergencies, which make people flee in despair and fear.
But it’s not just teachers.
Now, “junior doctors,” in the British system, are all those below the most senior rank — so… most of them. About half of Britain’s doctors plan to quit? And 80%…basically…can’t wait for the day they can? Again, these are incredibly, shocking, utterly spectacular numbers. Numbers of absolute crisis. That we don’t see outside genuine social emergency. Think of what it’d take to make half the doctors in a society want to quit for good. What else would do it? War? Famine? Sectarian violence? You have to reach for outlandish scenarios, like cataclysms, to really parallel what’s happening in Britain.
How do you have a functioning society where half the doctors plan to quit, and 10% of the teachers are quitting a year? Think about that for a second. Really stop and think about it, especially if you’re British, but even if you’re not, because this is what happens when you choose a certain path, but I’ll come back to that.
For now, just reflect.
The answer is: you don’t have a modern society anymore. That is what “collapse” is, in a formal, technical sense — moving down the ladder of development and modernity, and that is what’s happening to Britain, but in a sense that’s become genuinely frightening now, at least to the economist in me. What do you do without doctors and teachers, exactly? This is where Britain actually is. It has to begin asking questions this…surreal…dire. It is going backwards faster and harder than any society of its peers in modern history.
Let me emphasize it, because the British media doesn’t. It just mostly ignores the facts. But to the economist in me? Numbers like this are breathtaking. They are the stuff of social emergency on an historic scale. We just shouldn’t see statistics like this, period, full stop, ever. And for us to points to crisis of proportions that are…off the charts, really. A society’s basic systems no longer work, not just now, but over the long run.
Now. Why is that happening? Why are doctors and teachers — my two examples, but there are many, many more, from nurses to civil servants and so forth — quitting at staggering, crippling rates, or dreaming of it? Well, right about now, they’re all on strike, too. And the reason they’re on strike is that their pay has fallen in real terms. It’s been stuck since Britain was lured into its nationalist mania, and began to elect a series of more and more fanatically conservative governments. Those governments basically crushed public sector workers with austerity, and today, their real pay has fallen by astronomical amounts — 30%, 40%, take your pick, depending on the sector.
Let me put into perspective for you how shocking that is. A “junior doctor” — that’s someone with anywhere from five to ten years of training — makes maybe $50K. Nurses, even less than that. Teachers, even less than that. No wonder many of them have to resort to food banks. And no wonder they’re on strike.
The reports, though, are that instead of negotiating? Britain’s android schoolboy of a Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is going to simply… “block”…recommendations for rising pay.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happens next.
All those teachers go on quitting. All those doctors and nurses do quit. Rinse and repeat across the economy. And then there are no working social systems left. There already aren’t, in a weak sense — call an ambulance, and you’ll be lucky to get one. Schools are in dire crisis, going bankrupt, stretched to the limit. What comes after this point is the next stage of collapse, which is implosion — not just barely working systems, but nonexistent ones.
What kind of a Prime Minister doesn’t want his country to have teachers and doctors? What kind of a political party? Even America’s not that bad, when you think about it — doctors are handsomely rewarded, at least, even if teaching is in dire shape. To be worse than America? More regressive? What part of the scale even is that?
Think about that. Really think about it. Because here we have something genuinely bizarre happening. And now we’re going to come to the “what’s really happening to Britain” part.
There’s a word that I don’t use often — a phrase. It’s bandied about casually, especially online. To the economist in me, though, it has a technical, precise meaning, and I reserve it for special situations. Class war.
Now, this phrase is used a lot — and it’s overused, in fact. Let’s take the example of America. Class war? Not really. Not anymore, anyways. The class war ended, quite a while ago, and today, there’s no real middle or even working class to speak of. There’s the super rich, and then one vast underclass, which, sure, have varying levels of nominal income — but no real stability, security, upward mobility, or any other structural gains we’d associate with a “middle class” or “working class.”
In 21st century America, there are the rich, and everyone else, who live hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck, won’t pass anything onto their kids, won’t retire, never really own anything, are in lifelong debt, and so forth. The class war ended. And what’s left in America is what happens when a society loses one: the ultra rich basically own, control, dominate everything, generate artificial scarcities to control everything and everyone else with, right down to the shell of democracy itself, and there’s no real hope left in a society for a better future, which is why 80% of Americans say life won’t get better for them or their kids — and sadly, they’re right.
We don’t see class wars — true ones, really — that often. What’s called a class war is often wrapped up in all kinds of other, more primary things — religious fanaticism, conflict over resources, a lack of democratic development. Think of a pretty simple example: China’s youth are “lying flat,” which is a way of saying they’ve given up on the future, troubled by a toxic work culture and a lack of jobs, opportunities, mobility. Class war? That’s something that could become part of a class war — that’s a lost generation, and though these things are related, they’re not quite the same. Class wars produce lost generations. Lost decades. Lost societies. And yet for a full on class war? It takes a lot. Odds are that China’s leaders are going to have to adjust course due to the “lying flat” generation. Class conflict, brewing — but not all out class war.
Class conflict is common. But we don’t see true, all-out, vicious, no-holds barred class wars happen that often in modernity, because, well, governments usually come to their senses. Now, Britain’s history here is checkered. Thatcher comes to mind — and the Tories seem to love indulging in class war when they get the chance. But that’s not a good thing. There’s usually a sense amongst well educated leaders that you really, really don’t want a class war, because they rip societies apart. They produce boiling tensions. Leave lasting scars. Destroy modern systems and institutions, that take generations to rebuild. They hurt your economic output for good. They harm your relationships with the world, too, usually, by causing everything from strikes to just making you look foolish as a leader. Take a look at how Macron’s credibility has been diminished after he foolishly and needlesslyraised France’s retirement age — even Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau see him as less of a leader now. So all-out class wars are rarities now. They’re remnants of an older age, when the world was industrializing, and classes fought for their shares of the pie.
Today, those divisions are more or less well established, though they’re different across the globe. In Europe, labour takes 70–80% of national income — there, if you want to talk in classical economic terms, the proletariat won the class war. In America, capital takes more than half of national income, meaning the rich get most of growth in the form of dividends and rent and interest — there, capital won the class war.
I’m using a concept here called “the labour or capital share of income,” and this is what class wars are really about: who gets what? Is it the average working Joe, for working? Or the established elites, who already own much of a society — for renting it out?
So what about poorer countries? Well, as they struggle between autocracy and democracy, wrapped in that conflict is often a class war — do working people have a chance at a better life, or do the rich and powerful just capture all the gains? In those rare cases when democracy wins such conflicts, we can sometimes see something like the European Miracle happen.
Why do we want a higher share of labour income? Because of the European Miracle — think about it. The super rich aren’t interested, LOL, in a functioning society. They’re usually not too fond of funding things like functioning healthcare, education, transport, anything systems. They just want more. And so the only way we see the virtuous circle of modernity happen — the way it did in Europe — is when the labour share of income is higher than capital’s, first. Think about America to make the point: labour’s share of income is lower than capital’s, which is why America can never build functioning systems for anything, but in Europe, the opposite is true, which is why Europeans have expansive systems for everything from healthcare to high speed transport to education.
Now, that’s a lot of theory, because I want you to understand this subject well. We talk about “class war” casually, but don’t understand it formally, usually. And that brings us back to Britain.
What we see happening in Britain is something that’s incredibly rare, striking, unusual, and grim. An all-out, no holds barred class war. A real one. Britain is a society at war with itself.
Think about the examples above. A Prime Minister who…doesn’t want his country to have nurses and doctors and teachers? A party, an entire side of politics, that cheers it on? That’s OK with the basic forms of labour that make a modern society go — healthcare, education, public service — sliding into poverty, having to use food banks, quitting in despair…? What’s left at the end of that? What else can that be called, really, but a class war?
It’s irresponsible governance, negligence, of a shocking magnitude. The indifference of it should stagger any sane social scientist, because of course, the point of what we social scientists call “good governance” is…having a functioning modern society, not attacking and starving and punishing it out of existence.
This is a step even beyond Brexit. Plenty of us economists warned that Brexit would lead to a situation like this, because the only time we should see all-out class wars breaking out in modern societies is in the unusual circumstance where they suddenly become poorer, fast. Then, history rewinds — and classes have to renegotiate the hard-won social contracts of modernity. Those took decades, maybe centuries to win, and represented bargains between classes — OK, you guys get this share of national income, but we get a healthcare system, education, transport. You guys get this level of rent and interest, but we get upward mobility, stability, savings. And so on.
The precise shape of the bargain doesn’t matter, what does is that Brexit shattered it. And so Britain’s back in this strange Dickensian place: class war. All out. Vicious. Savage. Brutal. Merciless. Hey, teacher! Hit the food bank! Doctors want to quit? Great! I guess that’s more money for my investments in hedge funds that own private healthcare companies. Water systems full of sewage? Great! People will have to pay more for clean water! LOL! Let them eat…Brexit.
Let me close with one last example. The Bank of England just imposed a “shock and awe” rate rise. It used the logic that incomes are rising, so they had to. But…incomes…aren’t rising. They’re at 2005 levels. Is the Bank of England…lying? What reality is it in? Does it really not believe basic statistics? Those are questions for political scientists. To the economist in me, this is another example of class war.
There’s no evidence — LOL — that anyone at the average in Britain has…too much money. What a joke, when 10% of teachers are quitting in despair, and nurses use food banks. But we only raise rates this hard, this fast in that case — when people have too much money. To do so otherwise? It’s just punishment. It’s just sadism. It’s a wealth transfer, to those struggling with debt — which is the average person, mortgage, credit cards, car payments, loans…to those who earn interest, who are going to suddenly get a whole lot richer. For what? Did they do anything productive or constructive to deserve that newfound wealth? Of course not. It’s just…class war.
An all out class war is an ugly, ugly thing. I used the word Dickensian, and that’s probably the best way to understand one. It’s dehumanizing, brutal, anti-modern, and strips away basic values, like dignity, equality, truth, and decency from people, making them unaffordable luxuries. It drives people to despair and ruin, for nothing.
Because in the end, even the richest are better off in a functioning society, though they might not think so, like Britain’s delusional leaders themselves. Nobody’s rich enough to build their own hospital system, high-speed rail network, university — and be the only one in it. We are all better off in a modern society, which is what the entire point of the latter half of the 20th century taught us.
Who wins class wars? Nobody does. That is what history teaches us. Look at America. Everybody loses. America’s worse off as a society. Even billionaires are, because, let’s be real, who wouldn’t live in Paris or Antwerp or Rome if they had the chance? But why is that? It’s not just because of the luxury villa, it’s because of the avenues, squares, civilization, culture, systems, institutions.
All that class wars really leave in their wake are ruin, stagnation, and scars. Eventually, bargains of a wiser kind are made, the way they were in Europe and Canada, which fuel a virtuous cycle of investment, which is what really creates upward movement in prosperity and living standards.
So. The question was: can anything be done to arrest Britain’s shocking slide? The answer to that, or at least my answer, goes like this. Brexit made Britain a poorer country, suddenly, and that sparked, as it often does, a vicious class war. And only when and if Britain understands what a modern society is again, and why to value one, will all this have any hope of really coming to an end. Otherwise? Well, 10% of teachers quitting in a year should give you some grim indication of how much time Britain really has left.
